The present invention relates to an aircraft Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) and more particularly the provision of HUMS services through a web portal that provides comparative information on HUMS parameters relative to fleet statistics.
Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) are installed on various aircraft to monitor the health of critical components and collect operational flight data utilizing on-board accelerometers, sensors, and avionic systems. The on-board data is then transferred from the aircraft to a ground station to be viewed by an end-user.
A typical HUMS collects over 12 Megabits of data in a one-hour flight. The data may be a mix of raw parameters, discrete events, and calculated values. Conventional HUMS are vendor specific and are focused at viewing data from an individual aircraft over only a relatively limited time span, typically a few weeks to a few months. Conventional HUMS ground stations are also limited to the data collected by their own associated on-board system as data is often organized and stored differently depending on the HUMS manufacturer. This requires the end-user to have a ground station unique to the particular HUMS vendor to view that particular HUMS data. Vendor ground stations also have different graphical interfaces and features which may increase the workload of an end-user with a multitude of aircraft types.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a HUMS Service which collects, processes, analyzes and applies rule based logic to large amounts of HUMS data over prolonged periods of time to collate individual aircraft HUMS data into trendable HUMS data across an aircraft fleet.